Books that are getting away..: Sherko Fatah's The Dark Ship

Starting an occasional series of news on some books not out in English that you might want to hear about...

Das dunkle Schiff (The Dark Ship)
by Sherko Fatah
Publisher: Jung und Jung. 2008

This novel is about a Kurdish Iraqi young man who, after getting involved with fundamentalists, escapes Iraq to try to start a new life in Germany. The book deals with Iraq from Saddam Hussein's time to today, with people-smuggling and asylum seekers in Europe, with fundamentalists and terrorists cells, as we follow the young man's life in Iraq and then his journey to Europe, including a terrifying trip as a stowaway in the dark hold of a ship.

Fatah’s book would arguably be even more important in the UK than in Germany, as in the UK there is widespread misunderstanding about how many people are given asylum, and why they seek it. According to this article below, from last year, only around 3% of Iraqi asylum seekers were having their application accepted in the UK, the lowest figure in Europe, although how often do the papers tell us that? A quick trawl on the net didn't give me more recent figures, (yes, blogging doesn't replace work by paid journalists!), but my guess is that not much has changed for asylum seekers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/20/iraq.immigration


Whether or not it were such a pressing issue, whether or not you give a sh** about asylum seekers, one way or another, it's a great book.

Sherko Fatah, born in Germany into a Kurdish-Iraqi family, has real literary ability and his novel succeeds in touching on these many themes without seeming contrived, never tub-thumping, perhaps because of the beautifully quiet, reserved style of the narration. A style that also isn’t afraid of sounding characters’ inner depths and contradictions.

He's written other good books, including Im Grenzland (Borderlands), which follows a smuggler in Saddam Hussein's Iraq as he crosses the mined borderland to bring goods back to his northern Iraqi town. Das dunkle Schiff (The Dark Ship) is his masterpiece so far.

my discovery of 2008

I had a lot of fun last year translating lots of different German authors for an English language version of the Goethe-Institut website 'Deutschland Erlesen': a great idea - click on a city and you get poems and prose from and about that city by German writers.

Lots of really good pieces, but I was particularly happy to do it because it meant I read some authors I'd not got round to yet, and this Peter Kurzeck's writing blew me away:

http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/dle/fra/kur/enindex.htm

When Die Zeit’s autumn 2008 literary supplement asked which author should be awarded the Nobel Prize forLiterature he was the first to be mentioned. He is widely regarded as the great, overlooked German author of our times.
A quick browse through the major newspapers’ reviews of his books shows a rare degree of unanimous praise, comparing him to Robert Walser, Marcel Proust and Thomas Bernhard among others.
Précised reviews can be found in German here, for example:
http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/26585.html
A short summary of the acclaim his last book received can be found on this page in English:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1319.html

His books appear to be autobiographical. As he says at one point, he decided from an early age not to forget anything, and his books are a flow of memories, sensations and associations. Going beyond autobiography, a poetic story of a time unfolds: whether of his childhood village or the hustle and bustle of a big city. Nor does he change the names of places or people. As he said in an interview, he can’t bear to write in a ‘no man’s land’. Because things will never be as they are now, in this moment and place, he is compelled to capture them.
His amazed, bemused dwelling on the particularities of life is the reason why his books burst with a delight in people, places and foods, and are simultaneously terribly sad, they are the blues. His books are one long song to time passing, things lost, treasured moments here now but soon to be lost. And an immense pleasure and privilege to read.